Until the Voyager mission, research of the outer planets had only been carried out using telescopic observations. | Photograph of Jupiter with two moons, taken during Voyager 1’s Jupiter fly-by, Griffith Park Observatory.

Moons of the outer solar system (NASA/JPL).

Looking towards the Pacific from the Griffith Park Observatory.

Buildings 300 and 301 of the JPL, Woodward Street Complex, home of the Voyager Project Office, Pasadena, CA.

The Voyager Project conference room.

Dr Ed Stone, Voyager Project Scientist on the mission since it began in 1977. Voyager Project conference room.

Looking towards the Mission Control area. | Lego model of the Voyager probe in the Voyager Project conference room.

The Golden Record on the probe’s exterior, next to a silver temperature regulator.

The JPL control room. The place where data from ongoing missions is received and distributed to the relevant teams. The room is only fully occupied during critical manoeuvres such as launches and planetary encounters.

A few of the ongoing JPL missions are shown on the display screen in the control room. Besides Voyager 1 and 2, they are the Juno mission to Jupiter, launched in 2011, GRAIL and the Mars exploratory missions.

Right: The boundaries of the solar system (NASA/JPL).

At the Goldstone Deep Space Communication Complex, one of the three sites of the Deep Space Network, radio contact with JPL spacecraft is maintained. Entrance gate. GATE.

Nasa Road runs from Fort Irwin to the Goldstone Complex. Turn-off to the Venus Site and DSS13.

The Planetary Society, a private association with the aim of populising space exploration, is just a few miles from the JPL. As well as issuing fellowships for scientific research, the society carries out lobby work.

Portraits of the founders Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman in the stairway.

Bill Nye, Executive Director of the The Planetary Society, was a student of Carl Sagan at Cornell University. Office of The Planetary Society.

To promote space exploration, The Planetary Society, in collaboration with Lego, put a DVD on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity (2004). Also on Mars, due to another initiative of the society: a DVD for future astronauts (2007).

A replica of the Golden Record in the Theodore von Kármán Auditorium of the JPL.

Engraving on the protective cover of the Golden Record (negative). | The image NASA rejected for inclusion on the Golden Record. Instead, a silhouetted depiction of the image was used. (Photo: George Hester)

Voyager – The Grand Tour

2010 – 2015

Launched by NASA in 1977, the two Voyager probes were carrying identical golden discs. Borne into interstellar space, they contained greetings, images and sounds of the Earth, with the intention of communicating the terrestrial zeitgeist of the era.

Despite having disappeared from both the outer reaches of the solar system and the cultural consciousness, the Voyager programme now receives a unique bibliophilic memorial. With the sober insight of the 21st century, photographer Martin Eberle documents and recapitulates this self-intoxicated pinnacle of the space age in three meticulous volumes. Places, protagonists and technologies are vividly revisited, and the mission’s self-referential messages to the Earth’s inhabitants are resolved pictorially and textually.